While our focus in covering last week’s shooting has been on keeping up with the news, KCRW also happens to be located on Santa Monica College campus, where the rampage ended. This is an account of what happened behind the scenes at the station and how it stayed on-air after being evacuated.
KCRW General Manager Jennifer Ferro was leading a small station tour when a staffer interrupted to tell her there had been a shooting outside.
“Are you sure? Do you know what [gunshots] sound like?” Ferro asked him, thinking perhaps he’d mistaken fireworks for a weapon firing. Then Ferro saw another staff member, Kate Andersen, running down the hall.
“There’s a gunman,” Andersen said, breathless. “We just ran as fast as we could.”
At the same time, Ferro’s phone started receiving text messages from a friend in the Santa Monica Police Department, warning her of a shooting.
At that point, “I knew it was real,” Ferro said. “My immediate concern was our staff. I wasn’t thinking about what was on our air.”
It was a little past noon on Friday. The Santa Monica shooting rampage that left six people dead had just culminated on the Santa Monica College campus, where KCRW is headquartered. Throughout the rest of the afternoon and into the evening station managers, producers and engineers would scramble to cover the news while being swept up into the story.
The predicament posed a logistical challenge as well as some sticky editorial questions to be sorted out on the fly — the same ones that come up even in recounting the situation here: How do we weave the station’s experience into our coverage without overshadowing the news? Where’s the line between transparent and self-serving?
“I didn’t want us to get to a place where
everybody was talking about what was happening at KCRW and not what was happening with the shootings,” said Gary Scott, KCRW’s program director for news. “There wasn’t a whole lot of tension there; it was just about making sure we were doing news reports, and if KCRW’s experience was part of the news, there was no question we’d tell people.”
Nonetheless, he added: “There is an audience of people who might want to know what happened with KCRW, or why they heard certain things. We just need to tell that story in the right context.”
Scott and “All Things Considered” producer Avishay Artsy headed outside at the first report of gunshots. When they saw a pair of cops running onto the campus with rifles out, followed by the sound of rapid-fire gunshots, they returned to KCRW’s locked offices. Scott sent an email instructing everyone to stay put.
After about an hour had passed, however, Ferro got word of a suspect down. Scott and Artsy headed back outdoors to track down witnesses and gather information for the station’s anchors.
Most of the rest of KCRW’s staff remained gathered in the newsroom, watching local TV news for updates, putting out calls to police and feeding whatever they could to on-air hosts Cheryl Glaser and Eric Roy. Then, around 2 p.m., there was a battering on the doors. “Santa Monica police!” voices shouted seconds later, instructing everyone to get out.
“We’ve never in the history of KCRW… not had one single person in the station,” Ferro said. “Leaving your board in master control is like giving up your radio station and we’ve never, ever done it.”
But with employees’ safety potentially at stake, that’s what she decided to do.
The station had switched to a live stream of KCBS-TV by then, and engineers left that in place as police herded the staff out of the building and off the campus.
Right outside college grounds on Pearl Street, we passed a man’s dead body laying face up on the sidewalk. He wore all black, down to the socks on his feet. Shocked, several people broke into tears at seeing the body.
Remembering the report that a suspect was down, at that point KCRW Membership Director Beth Topping realized with horror she’d encountered the shooter (since identified as John Zawahri) a few hours earlier.